Homeschool Week in Review (Week 10)

I have no idea where this past week went. The last thing I remember, it was Monday evening. Some weeks are just like that, aren't they?

This year, for the first time, I have scheduled a catch-up day the last Friday of each month. If we've stayed on-track all month, we have that day off. If we're behind where I thought we'd be, we use that day to catch up. Taking one day off doesn't cause us to lose our momentum, and knowing that we can "earn" a three-day weekend has been a powerful motivator for all of us!

So here's what went on in the Button Factory this week--as best as I can remember, anyway!

Bible
We hadn't finished everything I wanted to talk about on last week's topic of Jehovah Shalom, so we carried it over for a second week. Ironically, just as we sat down to begin, I was overcome with one of those Mommy meltdown moments. Do you ever feel that even when they're listening, they're not listening? That's where I was. I would ask one child to look up one verse, and the other to look up a different verse.

Before I finished telling Child 2 what his verse was, Child 1 was asking, "Did you say Ephesians or Ezekial?"
Then Child 2 asked, "What chapter again?"

One-half of a second later, Child 1 needed me to repeat "what chapter? not the verse, just the chapter?"

Child 2 announced, "Got it!" and Child 1 said, "Okay, chapter 5, what verse?"

Child 2 then read his verse:

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.  Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. 

(emphasis added by Child 2 as he read.)

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Colossians 3:12-17

Don't ever let anyone tell you that the Bible doesn't speak to us right where we are, even today! It was a humbling lesson, but... 

The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

Hebrews 4:12

Math
My 8th grader had some kind of crazy converting-percentages-to-fractions lessons that I used to know how to do when I was in 8th grade, but I was utterly flummoxed this time around. They weren't normal percentages, for one thing. 50% = 1/2 = 0.5. I get that. But what is the fractional equivalent of 12 1/2%? We figured it out together, but seeing a fraction and a percent together just caused my brain to shut down. My sixth grader is working on bigger multiplication problems: 3-digits times 3-digits. She's pretty free-spirited and it's not easy for her to buckle down and pay attention to details for that long (If you think about it, that's 9 multiplication problems, plus adding.) I feel so sorry for her when she gets 90% of the answer right, but because of one mistake in multiplication or carrying or adding, the answer is wrong.

Grammar
Will finished his unit on nouns and pronouns and moved on to verbs. Katie was also working on nouns and also completed a couple of the first lessons on pronouns.

History
We talked about the events leading up to Egypt's independence from England in 1922.  I'm really excited about what's next, though: Fascism in Italy! Okay, that's probably a weird thing to be excited about, but I can't recall ever formally learning anything about Mussolini. I'll be sure to report back next week on what I learned! ha!

Literature
We're still reading Heroes of Olympus in the evenings. We've started working through some aspects of the adventure genre, mostly dealing with conflict so far. This is a big, complicated book with lots of story lines, so our attempt to identify the "main" conflict in the book almost led us into our own war. Such opinionated children!!

Science (co-op class)
Katie learned about the three different tests for determining the reliability of historical documents. They are, if you are interested, the external test, the internal test and the bibliographic test. I have no idea what Will learned in Physical Science because after helping Katie with General Science for 8,000 hours, I curled up in a corner and rocked myself until dinner time.

IEW (co-op class)
This is still everyone's favorite class. The dress-ups are starting to add up. We now have quality adjectives and the "www.asia" dress-up in addition to strong verbs, quality adverbs, who/which and because clauses. I'm ready to see some sentence openers any minute now.

So that's a quick run-down of Week 10. See you next time!